The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  In a corner of the room, the Fates sit, waiting, watching the moon swing around the sky. They are waiting for it to get into the right position. Everything has to be just so, before they act. So they crouch, motionless, as the knitting needles clack.

  When the moon is aligned with the window, and moonlight streaming through the room strikes her mother’s lap, the Fates snip the yarn. The booties tumble to the floor. Kate’s lips flutter as she lies on the side of the pool, one hand trailing into the water.

  ‘Where is the Sun right now?’

  It’s a sunny day and the physics class is stuck inside, trying not to stare out of the lab’s windows at the world beyond. There is silence. Jeanette is used to silence. The teacher talks, they write things down. When the teacher isn’t talking, they’re doing lab work and this too is done in silence. There are only five of them doing A-level physics, and she is the only girl. She didn’t really notice at first, there are so many other ways to classify them. Such as willingness to answer the teacher’s questions. She knows the answer to this question, but she also knows that always being able to answer the questions is enough to single her out, even more than being a girl. She isn’t sure she wants to be so different from the others. So she sits on her hands and waits.

  ‘Where is the Sun?’ the teacher repeats. Someone points halfheartedly out of the window at the Sun, but doesn’t speak.

  ‘No!’ The teacher sounds scornful.

  They’re doing the speed of light. They’ve worked their way up to it, from normal everyday speeds, people, bicycles, cars, to planes and rockets, to the speed of the Earth going round the Sun, and the Sun travelling around the Milky Way to the top speed. The biggest one of all.

  Jeanette knows where the Sun is right now. At least, she knows where it isn’t. It’s never where it appears to be, because it has always moved on. You see the Sun as it was, eight minutes ago, because that is how long it takes for its light to get to the Earth. And eight minutes is enough for the Sun to travel about a hand span across the sky.

  She puts up her hand. There is a pause while the teacher waits for someone else. She understands. It must be boring always to be faced with the same eagerness. But no one else moves and finally the teacher has to nod at her.

  ‘It’s not where we see it,’ she says, and someone behind her snorts in disbelief.

  ‘No? Why not?’

  So she tells him, along with the rest of the class. As she talks, she realises for the first time that if the Sun is eight minutes away, and the next star, alpha Centauri, is four lightyears away, then beyond that are stars further back in time. The light she sees now from those stars has been emitted by them before Kate died. She has the power to see into the past, into a Universe which is innocent of Kate’s death.

  One evening she sees a comet. It has been predicted to appear but there’s an uncertainty over how bright it will be. It’s difficult to tell in advance, for various reasons. So Jeanette isn’t very optimistic as she stands outside facing away from the house, from all the houses, to avoid as much artificial light as possible, training her binoculars into the night.

  She finds the right part of the sky, and waits. The trick is to not look at it straight on. Faint objects are always best seen if you look to one side, to avoid the blind spot at the back of the eye. She doesn’t find this so difficult, it’s similar to the way she used to look at Alice.

  At first it’s a smudge on the sky, as if someone has left their fingerprint on a glass. Then, she notices the tail, a curling wisp. She stands and watches it for some time, able to see how it moves between the other objects in the sky, as if seeking out a place to rest, until it finally gets too close to the Moon and is drowned by light, like a moth plunging towards a lightbulb.

  Comets are usually harbingers of disaster. But Jeanette can’t imagine what could change in her life. Kate is dead and Alice has gone. All she does is plod through the days.

  Sometimes when she walks home from school, she can convince herself that by the time she arrives, something will have changed. But nothing changes. Their home is a desert devoid of time. Her mother occupies a space consisting of cigarettes and spoons of instant coffee and magazines and daytime TV. Her father does the same things every year to grow his vegetables and flowers. They’re all trapped on a merry-go-round.

  The only way to escape is to travel into atoms and stars. To learn that neutrons have a half-life of nine minutes once they’ve left the safety of the atom, and that their death is a spectacular karmic transformation into protons and electrons and anti-neutrinos. To uncover the ages of the Universe, like geological layers, and see how the constant expansion of the Universe makes time happen.

  Perhaps that is the problem at home. Because nothing obvious ever changes, time itself can’t intrude. But she herself is gradually, minutely, changing. She is now taller than Kate ever was. Her hair is lighter. But none of these changes triggers anything. They aren’t enough to make her visible.

  Only once does she emerge in front of her parents. She keeps a small photo of Alice in her purse. She’s almost forgotten about it, until one day when her mother asks her for some change and it falls out.

  ‘What’s that?’ Her mother sounds frightened. Perhaps for a moment she thought it was Kate. They both look at the scrap of paper and Alice looks back at them.

  ‘It’s only a photo.’ She’s stupidly relaxed; even the sight of Alice fills her with unexpected joy.

  ‘But why…’ her mother peers closer. ‘Is that Alice? Why…’

  ‘Why not?’

  Her mother looks straight at her for the first time in years. ‘Why have you got a photo of Alice in your purse?’

  And she knows that her mother knows, that in spite of all the suffocating silences and fog of cigarette smoke, her mother can see perfectly well when she chooses to.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her fingers scrabble to pick it up and tuck it back into the safety of her purse, where it belongs. ‘It’s nothing.’

  Perhaps silence is better after all.

  Orion is shining brightly. She’s out in the garden, with her telescope. She doesn’t really have anything in mind tonight, she’s just aimlessly scanning the sky. The camera is bolted to the back of the telescope; in case anything interests her, it can be recorded. She locks the telescope onto Algol, the brightest star in Orion, almost absent-mindedly, and stands listening to the whirr of the motor as the telescope tracks the star across the sky, like a mechanical dog faithfully following its distant owner. Behind her squats the house and she knows that if she turns around, she’ll be able to see through the glass into the living room where her parents sit, still and silent, soaked in the glare of the television. How long will it be before they absorb so much light from it that they start to glow blue themselves? She takes care to keep her back to them.

  It’s a clear night, one of the clearest for a long time. No moon either. Ideal for observing, for seeing the faintest objects that would otherwise be drowned out by cloud, or moonlight, or turbulence in the air. So she decides to have a go at Rigel, one of the many double stars in Orion. It’s made up of a bright star and a fainter companion, which is usually too close to the bright one to be seen with her little telescope. She lines the brighter star up in the crosshairs of the telescope and sets the telescope off again, in search.

  As she waits, the garden waits with her. She only ever comes out here at night. As its details merge into the dark, it loses a sense of its own history and is transformed into something more generic.

  Later, she unloads the film, develops it and prints the contact strips. She watches the tank as the fainter star comes to life beneath the clear liquid. This is what she can do. Make the unseen, seen. Find things and know them. These things are real to her, even though she can’t reach them.

  She has to make a decision about her life, but for her it’s no decision at all, because there’s no choice. She is going to leave home and go to university. To study physics and astronomy. She’s nervous abo
ut telling them, but she’s not sure why. Will they be bothered, will they notice? And a quieter, sicker thought, will they be relieved if she goes? Perhaps they can pretend they don’t have, have never had, any daughters.

  Alice doesn’t write. Jeanette has lost track of where she’s supposed to be now, in her round-the-world gap year journey. She doesn’t really want to think about the vast distances that separate her from Alice. She can’t imagine Alice being capable of navigating herself home again. She prefers to conjure up that first memory of Alice, emerging from the darkroom, her small face lit by the deep glow of the safety light. As if they had met on another planet, orbiting around a red star.

  ‘How did you and Dad first meet?’ she asks her mother one weekend afternoon when her father is outside, out of view.

  Her mother lays down her magazine and stares off into the middle distance as if looking back in time. ‘It was at a train station. I got something in my eye and he offered me his hanky.’ She smiles — a small, secret smile. Jeanette doesn’t see her mother smile often. After a moment her mother picks up her magazine again. Jeanette can picture the two people standing on a platform, like mechanical dolls, one offering a hanky to the other, who takes it and dabs at her eye.

  ‘He missed his train because of me.’ Her mother looks like she’s reading but Jeanette can still see the remains of the smile. She wishes she knew how to make it last. Perhaps it will work with her father too.

  ‘How did you and Mum first meet?’ They are outside and her father is digging in a vegetable patch. The windows to the house are opaque with reflected sunlight. No way of telling if her mother is looking out at them.

  ‘It was at a station. I got something in my eye and she offered me her hanky. If I remember correctly, she missed her train and I sat with her until the next one arrived.’ He grins, but Jeanette does not grin back. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, but she just shakes her head.

  Why is it so difficult, she thinks. Why is it impossible to ever really know anything about other people? Is it safer to stick to atoms and stars? It makes her sad that Kate never knew the beginning of her story. The true beginning, not the made-up one that her parents seem to have taken refuge in. So Jeanette will have to find out for her.

  She discovers that Kate was born 13.7 billion years ago, in the Big Bang. The primordial explosion of space and time. At first it was too hot for anything to form, so there was just the promise of her, a whisper in the rapidly expanding vacuum, a quantum tremor in the plasma sea of quarks and gluons.

  Then, a decision, a deliberation, a definite fluctuation. But still she could not be seen. Not until 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when protons and photons separated for the first time, and light was set free to travel.

  Now she appears large on the sky. Hydrogen atoms form around her and gas flows towards her. Dark matter dances in attendance to her. She is written in the first stars. But these are too large and powerful for their own good, they grow quickly and die young. Their exploding ashes kick start the generation of the chemical elements, thrust out to fend for themselves.

  She waits. She can wait.

  More stars, smaller stars, are born. These last longer, long enough for the debris of their birth to settle into planets. Carbon and oxygen get swept up onto a planet where it’s not too hot or too cold, and wait for life to form.

  This must be the beginning of Kate. This version is knowable, understandable. One event leads to another and there is proper cause and effect. This is what she deserves. The other version is too uncertain, there are too many unknowns. One person could have missed the train, or got on a different carriage. The speck of dust would have taken a chaotic path through the atmosphere to hit that person’s eye. It would have been bounced around by the wind, chased by raindrops, it could have hit another part of that person and lain on their skin or clothes, unnoticed.

  Whose eye did it hit? Their mother’s or father’s? Who owned the handkerchief, conveniently washed and ready for its part in their conception? That story isn’t even complete.

  What about alternative theories? The Big Bang theory is not the only one they’re taught. There is another one, the steady state theory, somewhat out of favour now and discarded. But Jeanette must consider it.

  It’s good enough, up to a point. It can create the elements in the stars, seed life on the planet. Galaxies come and go, stars are born and die, but overall everything stays exactly the same. There is no beginning to this story, just endless darkness. Kate deserves better. Kate deserves the beginning of the Universe.

  At night the corridors go on forever. But it’s just an illusion, caused by the darkness masking the end of the corridors. The lights turn on automatically above you, illuminating the piece of space that you happen to be occupying. Ahead of you as well as behind you, there is just darkness, and so you move on, in your small island of light towards an unseen dark end. Which may never arrive.

  Jeanette works at night. It’s better that way. Now it’s dusk and she can hear her colleagues leaving the Observatory, going home. She is not going anywhere. She is going to work tonight, as she does most nights. She likes the Observatory in the dark and the silence. There’s more room to breathe out, she feels an easing in her chest and she relaxes.

  She’s working on the map of her galaxies in her part of the universe. This map shows velocities as well as positions, so she can see not only where each galaxy is, but also where it’s moving to. Each galaxy has a little arrow attached to its position, the length of the arrow shows how fast it is moving, and the direction shows where it is moving to. A map of the universe would show all galaxies moving away from all other galaxies. Each galaxy left behind in a perfect symmetry of isolated space.

  At midnight she prints the map out and walks up the silent corridor to collect it from the server room where the printers are. She’s done a large scale print, so she can pin it on the wall and take a step back to get an overall impression on what the galaxies are doing.

  The corridor is silent and the light throbs above her. She stops moving, the light blinks off, and she’s in the dark. The corridor expands, fills the universe. She is alone. She has to put a hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out.

  A dot of light appears wavering in the distance — the security guard. He flips the light switch at the end of the corridor and the whole space shrinks down, becomes ordinary again. She’s able to go and collect her print and return to her office, even to reply to the guard when he speaks to her. She sees him every night, after all.

  In her office, she shuts the door behind her. Looking out of the window at the smeared red sky, she feels like she’s on a stalk high up over a dark field, and she imagines her office is the only one in the whole building, the light seen from miles away.

  But as the light from here leaks out there, so does the dark from there leak into her room. She wonders where the boundary is, and how light and dark interchange there.

  The map of her galaxies isn’t what she expected. Until she looks at the map, she doesn’t realise that she did actually expect anything, but now she knows that this was not it. She never does expect the reality of things. She should have learnt that by now.

  What the map show her is the usual sprinkling of galaxies, represented by black dots, scattered across the white paper. This is normal, this is expected. But the arrows attached to the galaxies show them all moving in the same direction, away from the centre of this space. There should be enough of them to keep them together, but something is missing. At some point in the future, these galaxies will have left this space, will have forsaken it. There will be nothing there. She could weep for the future of this abandoned space. But she doesn’t. She has work to do.

  What defines this space is her interest in it. It has no other boundaries. But she has drawn an edge around it in order to learn about it. Does that make it real, she wonders? And taking her pencil, she traces a hole in the air in front of her.

  Kate doesn’t exist anymore, not even
in Jeanette’s head. The exploding rocket has killed her all over again. Jeanette can’t even summon up her face. When she tries to, there’s a blank, a vacuum. A white space hovering in mid-air, defying gravity.

  And when she looks in the mirror at her own face, there’s also a blankness. The individual features don’t add up to anything anymore. She is not the sum of her parts.

  Other people at work seem to avoid her. In the corridors, they walk past her quickly, calling out ‘Hi!’ behind them, without stopping to listen to her reply. Or they veer round her, as if getting too close to her is dangerous.

  She’s not surprised. She’s realised from her latest project that voids exist in the universe. Nature abhors a vacuum, galaxies rush out of voids because there is not enough mass there to keep them in. She has her own void now. There is not enough of her to keep anyone else there.

  She knows now that her work on the connected galaxies was all wrong. She and Maggie must have made a mistake because the universe is not about connections. It’s about separation, vastness, coldness. One of the books that she’s reading right now is called ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. It explains that due to the second law of thermodynamics, everything will run out of useable energy and wind down like broken clocks, reaching a sort of refrigerated equilibrium. She thinks she’s reached this stage somewhat earlier than anyone else.

  One day follows another. She makes her maps. She writes a paper about them and submits it to a scientific journal. It’s accepted. She’s not surprised, she’s on the right track now. Not the short, sharp scramble, but the steady, slow plod. She even thinks more highly of Richard’s everlasting data processing. Really, there’s no point trying to form an opinion about the universe. It just is. The only thing to do is to observe it, and refrain from passing comment.

  She goes back to Chile to work on the voids. She knows from her work with the glass plates that there are patches of sky that don’t appear to have any galaxies, but the glass plates are not that sensitive and she wants better data to see whether there are faint galaxies that have been undetected so far, or alternatively if these apparent voids really are completely empty of any normal matter.